But first one must learn how to look at the world rationally

Grundlegung A philosophy blog Philosophy as Bildung October 21, 2008

In a recent post, I claimed that we ought to defend a form of philosophical humanism. By this, I meant that we should confront a certain embarrassment concerning the human. One variety of such embarrassment is expressed in strident naturalism about philosophical explanation. Naturalisms of this sort seek to shift the locus of philosophical explanation, whether ontological or justificatory, to something more fundamental than the considerations given in everyday practices of explanation. For example, here I have in mind efforts to bring cognitive science to bear on moral psychology. Within many such debates, the ‘folk psychology’ possessed by normal agents is contrasted with the results of the modern psychological sciences, laden with the outcome of brain scans and other neurological research. The suggestion is that philosophy of mind ought to take off from these cutting edge results, which present us with the most accurate accounts of the mind available, rather than the messy self-understanding of ordinary agents which, although useful in practical situations, is often shot with delusions, simplification and convenient fictions. My reservations are not primarily directed at the cognitive sciences per se (and certainly not all forms of naturalism), only the thought that philosophical explanation must start from this point instead of the more familiar understanding of ourselves expressed in ordinary discourse. This is the conviction that, when it comes to philosophy, what we say when we chat with our friends, say, or the way that Sophocles characterises shame, leaves nothing out. In part, this conviction is founded upon a different way of approaching the tasks of philosophy.

If philosophy is to provide us with a maximally coherent account of how the world is, being a handmaiden to the sciences which works upon the more abstract and conceptual difficulties which they throw up, then the idea that it ought to accept the same reductive and naturalistic approach to explanation is much more palatable. That sort of activity may very well be a precondition of achieving the invaluable insights provided by science. Yet, I don’t think that attempts to reframe in this context traditional philosophical problems, concerning knowledge or practical deliberation, for example, are at all illuminating. This is because these problems are, predominantly, troubling in a different way to scientific problems. Once again, Wittgenstein expresses this idea well. In a heading of the ‘Big Typescript’, he writes: “DIFFICULTY OF PHILOSOPHY NOT THE INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTY OF THE SCIENCES, BUT THE DIFFICULTY OF A CHANGE OF ATTITUDE. RESISTANCES OF THE WILL MUST BE OVERCOME.” He then goes to say, “Work on philosophy is – as work in architecture frequently is – actually more of a //a kind of// work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On the way one sees things. (And what one demands of them.)” (PO: 162-3) Without wanting to overgeneralise from these remarks, I think we can see within them a kind of schematic for philosophy. I shall now go on to say a little about how I propose we should think about philosophy, or at least one its central currents, and which connects this Wittgensteinian view with some which may seem like natural adversaries to it.

What might it mean to say that work on philosophy is work on oneself? Helpful here is a German term, important for understanding post-Kantian idealism, namely, Bildung. It can be translated variously as education, nurture, development, formation or culture. Such elasticity of meanings might serve to shroud rather than reveal the idea it seeks to capture though. In the Hegelian usage which I prefer, it can be taken to name a process of self-cultivation through which, in a struggle to understand who they are, someone achieves a more liberated mode of relating to themselves and therewith the world as a whole. This need not imply anything spooky is going on, nor that some imposing idealist apparatus is called upon. Instead, we might consider the sort of thing that happens in a Bildungsroman; the independence of maturity is achieved through the resolution of conflicts over the protagonist’s self-identity. Thought of in this way, we can contrast Bildung, qua self-directed process, with other ways of being developed or formed. As Allen Wood puts it, “the entire process of Bildung is fundamentally an inner or self-directed activity, never merely a process of conditioning through environmental stimuli, or the accumulation of information presented by experience.” (‘Hegel on Education’, p.4)

It is with this sort of understanding of Bildung in mind that I suggest we take up Wittgenstein’s idea that work on philosophy is work on oneself. Philosophy, practiced aright, does not seek to give us theories built upon our experience of the world (though it by no means operates independently of such experience), but nor does it counsel simply following the inclinations which we form just as inhabitants of the natural world. Instead, at least for the most part, it is about achieving a certain practical orientation towards ourselves, our fellows and the rest of the world. This practical orientation consists in both intellectual and affective sensitivity, and so it might be said to concern a way (or our ways) of seeing. Again, we might say that philosophy, so conceived, is irreducibly aesthetic, insofar as we adopt a broad understanding of the aesthetic. So characterised, the conception of philosophy I have outlined may seem either hopelessly broad and vague or intolerably strange and idiosyncratic. To make it more determinate, I shall point to two examples of what I take to be philosophy practiced in this vein. I’ve chosen to pick out Hegel and Nussbaum, though it may equally have been Aristotle, Adorno, Wittgenstein, McDowell, Anscombe or Marx.

Take Hegel to begin with. What we find in the Phenomenology is an analysis of a procession of forms of consciousness and forms of the world which are outgrowths of ordinary ways of looking at the world. The use (or embodiment) of the fundamental logical categories of particularity, universality and individuality within these forms shows them to be unstable, since none of them can overcome the difficulties of reconciling subject and object. Hegel’s aim is to lead us along a ‘pathway of despair’ (and therefore an intellectually and emotionally transformative narrative) which shows us how to recognise and begin to avoid these instabilities. The result is absolute knowing; not a megalomaniacal claim to comprehensive or divine knowledge, but a standpoint — a place from where to see the world — from where we can overcome the gulf between subject and object, as previously expressed as problems bridging mind and world, intention and action, inner and outer, and so on. Thus, the groundwork is laid for the task of re-cognising the phenomena previously encountered in our ordinary ways of seeing the world, critically reappraising and adjusting these ways of seeing such that we can come to an unalienated or homely (heimlich) relation to our world. Ultimately, for Hegel, philosophy is concerned with examining the concept, understanding the rational basis of things, and this redounds upon the rational being doing the examining, setting them free from the mere positivity of phenomena — being brutely confronted with them in their contingency, rather than grasping how they do and indeed must relate to oneself. But first one must learn how to look at the world rationally, where this is a long and difficult process fraught with as many practical and affective problems as cognitive ones, and which does not issue in a theory of everything but a mode of facing the world: not simply a set of propositions, but a practical way to confront it.

Nussbaum’s work is altogether more modest and it is undertaken in a rather different spirit. Nevertheless, there are important similarities which I would like to try and draw out. Again, there is a kind of aesthetic thread to be picked up — one that consists in cultivating a variety of perception, not in any empiricist or intuitionist sense but rather as a sensitivity to the world which takes the form of a kind of practical knowledge or phronesis. We see this method deployed brilliantly in The Fragility of Goodness. In it, Nussbaum undertakes a forensic analysis of the details of Greek philosophy and tragedy which she brings to bear upon questions of moral luck, tragic conflict and practical deliberation. What makes the book so great as philosophy, rather than simply historical scholarship, is how it manages to draw so much sustenance from the literature it considers whilst putting its ideas to work in providing vivid ‘reminders’ and ‘objects of comparison’ (to resort to Wittgesteinian terminology) with which to illuminate our ethical lives. Its approach to literature is deeply philosophical; and conversely too, with its philosophical proclivities being similarly literary. This is another example of what I have been calling philosophical humanism: a confidence in the narratives we tell about ourselves and what matters to us. Of course, we need (and ought) not take all these stories at face value, but an underlying trust in our ability to capture the fundamentals of life in the mainstays of human activity is on display here. Art, whether individually or collectively, can be contextualised and historicised, subjected to evolutionary adaptionist explanation, Ideologiekritik, and so on, but none of these things can explain it away as a whole such that it loses its respectability as a philosophical resource. Artistic activity retains its legitimacy as a tool for providing genuine, first-rate knowledge of truths about value, the mind, action, emotion — about human life in general — and insofar as it does, we must again question the rush to those reductionist accounts predicated upon an uneasiness with the merely human. Posted in Alienation, Ethics, Hegel, Literature, Methodology, Nussbaum, Wittgenstein 4 comments

Good post. by YH October 21, 2008 at 6:22 am

An afterthought though. Might your phrase ‘work on oneself’ be a little misleading? I say that because I’m sure you’d want to capture the element of inter-subjectivity in both Geist and Bildung. It is after all others or an other who is/are the typical prompt of an individual’s change in viewpoint. Of course one often reads alone, but even reading is an inter-subjective business, interaction with the words of others sedimented in tradition. I like to think Wittgenstein (of the Phil Inv at least) would agree with this too.
Tangentially, this is why Habermas is surely wrong to see Hegel’s Absolute Knowing as having fallen back on a model of the individual mind and to have lost the achievements of Geist construed inter-subjectively. Absolute Knowing is, after all, internally related to mutual recognition, i.e. the free interaction of human beings beyond a condition of alienation. by YH October 21, 2008 at 10:00 am

Yes, this seems right. I have no particular attachment to the phrase ‘work on oneself’, especially if it is taken to exclude dialogical, traditional, cultural or environmental pressures as the impetus to philosophical development. In fact, this extends to thought in general, which is always a matter of both the spontaneous activity of agents and their receptivity to the non-subjective conditions which they find themselves in; and sociality obviously has an integral role here. The intersubjectivity of Geist points to the unavoidable influence that others have in prompting individuals to cognitive-cum-emotional activity and in shaping the horizons within which such activity takes place. Philosophy is, of course, no exception to this. by Tom (Grundlegung) October 21, 2008 at 2:45 pm

I was wondering what you made of a thought that’s been floating around here recently. I suspect that you might agree, and I think I do too. In the context of discussions of ‘experimental philosophy’ people often say that, for example, experiments that point to the effects of the environment on intuitions should lead to scepticism about those judgments. But as these cases are set up the problems alleged will apply to all judgments. So we get a kind of global scepticism. This looks like a reductio of the experimentalist’s position.
If I read your post right you have a different sort of reason for rejecting some sorts of experimental philosophy, because it’s anti-humanist. But this other line of thought looks like it’s coming from a similar motivation. by Tom October 22, 2008 at 1:11 pm

In Process Thought, Whitehead describes God as All-Compassion

Against Natural Theology by cjsmith Indistinct Union
These are some scattered thoughts arising in relation to a paper I’m working on for a class in Process Theology.

Alfred North Whitehead godfather of Process Thought argued for a God within his overall cosmological system. Fairly unique contribution relative to modern era philosophers in that regard. So Process Thought is deeply imbued with a Natural Theological strain. David Ray Griffin one of the godsons (I suppose) of Process Theology wrote a classic text arguing for a new Christian natural theology.
Natural Theology is the belief that arguments at the level of reason alone can be proferred to prove the existence of God. Usually these arguments grow from a study/interpretation of the natural world.
One of the classic arguments in this regard is Thomas Aquinas’ Argument from Necessity.
Observing that every being in nature requires another being for its existence (i.e. everybody has ‘rent[s] in the universe) Aquinas argued that therefore the entire universe was (in the parlance) contingent. And therefore the universe itself required a being to bring about its existence. Namely God.
The problem with this theory is the extrapolation from individual cases to the universal. Just because all beings in the universe require a cause does not mean the universe is the same as individual beings. Aquinas to his credit did leave open the possibility that the Universe was eternal (though intriguingly for the purposes of my argument he believed the universe had a beginning in time because the Church said so–i.e. it was an article of faith).
He argued that the Universe could not have existed (true) and therefore there must have been a Necessary Being to get the universe going (wrong). Or rather why would that being be Necessary and not simply another in a causal chain? [Aquinas has to assert without evidence that an infinite causal chain can not be--but why is that automatically the case?]. The argument only functions if you can prove that there is no infinite causal chain. But you can’t prove there is no infinite causal chain without proving a Necessary Being (i.e. the difference between causing to be and causing to exist I would argue is already a theological distinction which assumes that which it is supposed to prove) but you can’t prove the Necessary Being without proving there is no infinite causal chain which in turn you can’t prove without proving a Necessary Being which you can’t prove without proving no infinite causal chain, which you can’t…..and you see the circularity.
Later came the classic argument from design–that the Universe was like a watch and therefore just as a watch required a watchmaker so the Universe requires a designer. Of course the idea that the universe is like a watch is a human construct and metaphor. It’s a human interpretation. It’s an interpretation btw of a well educated, Western European in the modern period (like William Paley who wrote this in the 19th century) because watch making was considered a high art and technology in his day.
What both of these arguments are getting at and what I think can be established through science and philosophy is that there is Eros or a potential for Emergence in the Universe (see footnote26). But that is nowhere near the same as proving the existence of a God.
The question of a god/God is always part of a religious tradition. It is always part and parcel of the intersubjective, linguistic reality in which we are formed. Natural theology being a 3rd person “ITS” view of things, forgets the inter-subjective construction of reality and believes there is a way to get to The Objective Truth once and for all. [Classic modernist fallacy].
How that this shakes out in practice is something along what the lines of Derrida describes as the absent shaping the present. In Process Thought, Whitehead describes God as All-Compassion (Love). But why would be the case? In a certain strand of Buddhism, for example, there is the concept of the alaya vijnana (the so-called Store House Consciousness). Which is also elsewhere called the Causal Consciousness. The store house ’stores’ all the memories of the Kosmos in a way very similar to how Whitehead’s Process God is the one who integrates all reality into itself and re-members it. (Everything is redeemed through the Divine’s Memory).
Now of course the Process view has an evolutionary twist that the store house lacks–since evolution was not understood in the intersubjective when the notion arose in Buddhism. But notice in the Store House concept is no necessary description of Love per se. Because that is a construct built out of the Biblical heritage.

Which is exactly my point–back to Derrida for a second. The absent is theology and the intersubjective. [Whitehead's philosophy is only partially intersubjective not fully so]. Because Whitehead, as the son of an Anglican clergyman, grew up in the Anglican tradition of Holiness/Beauty of God, this has to be background for his philosophy. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just means the idea that this provable from the exterior world or from interior (individual-subjective only) reflection is way off base. Published in: Christianity Hermeneutics Integral Religion philosophy theology on October 15, 2008 at 8:17 am Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Process Theology

One Comment Leave a comment. On October 15, 2008 at 9:28 am MD Said:
As usual, you leave out all that which complicates your little theories and so-called scattered thoughts (thinking to myself, and your “scattered thoughts” differs from your actual thinking, how?)
The argument using Reason for the existence of God requires one grapple with more than you demonstrate above (and more than you have ever demonstrated, given your fly-by thinking, pathetic routine):
1) what it means to “make” versus “bringing about the conditions for making” 2) what it means to be a contingent being (the consequences of that fact), a conclusion that appears to be opinion but is actually truth akin to 1+1=2 3) what it means to define God in entirely negative terms (i.e., the theological consequences of that entirely correct approach) 4) the percept space (not the concept space) that emerges when one devote meditation to these questions, and to the consequences of God defined in this way
(the importance of point 4, in case you can’t read well, is that it renders your Wilberian “ITS” enterprise moot)
I might add the point that the fact that you introduce Derrida to this mix is not only laughable, but further indication of how in the tank you are for postmodernist word-games, and how bottom line unseriously you take these matters, and the meditative tradition within Christianity that blew over the simpleton ideas of Derrida and the like long before he was miraculously made into a human being by some non-human, necessary being of which we know nothing.

We just behave as though people were free, and therefore responsible. It is an article of faith, not of logic

Thoughts, Books, and Philosophy The Critical Synopses of J.H. Bowden Home About Freedom and Its Betrayal Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) Further reading: David Stove, On Enlightenment This entry was posted on October 5, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under philosophy, politics. Tagged: Isaiah Berlin. 5:04 PM

Freedom and Its Betrayal presented six portraits of thinkers, five progressives and one conservative, who opposed human liberty. Berlin skillfully identified each philosopher’s central vision of life, that is, life as it should be. The selected progressives– Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, and Saint-Simon, each begin by championing human liberty, only to end with a principle or system opposing it. The token conservative, Maistre, consistently opposed liberty.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) believed that liberty is the recognition of necessity. Like the Oracle from The Matrix, we’ve already made the choice; we only need to understand why we made it. Hegel’s philosophy resembles the music of Beethoven– an organic, self-animating totality, a living system of developing intensity uncontrollably driving toward a ringing, predetermined end. Hegel believed understanding something involved knowing its ultimate purpose, its uniting completion. History itself is a story of human creation, human imagination, human wills, and human intentions. Describing all of this in terms of mind-independent particles on an x-y-z grid was unintelligible to Hegel– we cannot even understand a flower in this manner, for function is important. Hegel’s reality at basis resembles what humans do and feel, for his universe itself is the self-development of the world spirit. If one doesn’t grasp the pattern, one doesn’t understand. Development proceeds by the dialectic; I dare not call it a mechanism. This progressive cosmos develops by a dynamism of clashing forces. Conflict is the symptom of health, evolution, growth, the flowing of life. Since the pattern is more fundamental than the individual, it follows that the Absolute’s march through the universe takes place through the vehicle of the state. The wish to be is the wish to be rational, and what is rational is what triumphs– the collective. This has led critics, including Berlin, to assert that Hegel worshiped power, and power alone.

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) saw himself as the messiah of the new, progressive age. Berlin portrayed Saint-Simon’s mind as a choatic mind buzzing with confusion and chaos, brilliance alternating with nonsense. Saint-Simon wanted to liberate mankind by forging a world federation resembling something akin to Star Trek. Unlike like the utilitarians, Saint-Simon’s imagination did not take abstract and relational forms, but worked through the concrete and the situational in the spirit of the later pragmatists. Saint-Simon introduced a technological interpretation of human history; the superstructure of our culture is determined by the technological possibilities of the economic base. He was also responsible for introducing the idea of defining social entities in terms of a civilization’s means of production. Saint-Simon’s world allowed the best to reach the top based on merit, and it also, through Councils of Newton, would construct a centralized industrial plan benefiting everyone, including society’s lowest members. Saint-Simon had the mind of an engineer– nothing is stable, nothing is absolute, everything evolves, and the innovative is always the best. Saint-Simon, like modern progressives, was also an elitist; he honestly stated that good government excludes self-government. The masses can never know this, so activists for change must also build a double morality, a set of rules for radicals.

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), the Voltaire of conservatism, literally preached darkness and mystery. Maistre found only bloodshed and suffering in human history, not peace and harmony. Order can only be achieved by the threat of pain, via punishment or war. Maistre looked directly at man, and found no noble savages, only savages everywhere, creatures innately vicious, wicked, and cowardly. Central to Maistre’s pessimistic philosophy is the idea that rationalist notions do not work. Whatever is irrational survives; whatever is rational perishes. With the experience of the French Revolution, Maistre found it absolutely imprudent to destroy diversity in the name of equality. If man is constituted by instinct, superstition, and prejudice– the beliefs and habits of the centuries tested by experience– one opens the gates of hell by purifying man, or even attempting to liberate him. The irrational mist of contingent mysteries that constitute Maistre’s universe cannot be integrated into any natural purpose. Man must return to obedience and subjection; authority and power are intimations of the divine. Criticism, questioning, and science were all signs of malice. The same spirit of Maistre’s stoic and relativist philosophy flowed through the mindset of the 19th century Russian Tsars.

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Isiah Berlin was not in the first league of philosophers. He was not sufficiently inventive or dogmatic...These essays are a perfect introduction to Berlin and his life-long preoccupation: the "problem" of the Enlightenment...

In Liberty (Oxford, £12.99), a newly reprinted and augmented version of his 1969 Four Essays on Liberty, he agonises on another piece of Enlightenment fall-out. If man is a part of nature, then his thoughts and actions are "determined". In which case, what can liberty consist in? Berlin lamely says that lots of people who insist that man is determined (eg the Marxists) go on to exhort people to this or that (revolution, say) as though they were free to choose. He could more simply have said: we just behave as though people were free, and therefore responsible. It is an article of faith, not of logic. By Richard D North The perils of idealism Monday, 29 July 2002 Home > Arts & Entertainment > Books > Reviews > Freedom and Its Betrayal: six enemies of human liberty, by Isaiah Berlin

The power of sportive self-entanglement in the flux of becoming

Space, Time and Eternity DR. HARIDAS CHAUDHURI SRI AUROBINDO MANDIR ANNUAL No. 9 15th August, 1950 ON THE OCCASION OF THE 78th BIRTHDAY OF SRI AUROBINDO SRI AUROBINDO PATHAMANDIR CALCUTTA

TIME AS THE SUPREME CREATIVE PRINCIPLE

While Spinoza holds that all material objects are modes of space or extension, Bergson contends that all the objects of our experience are deposits of the movement of time. For Spinoza, space is something basic, it is some sort of stuff, a view from which, as we shall see later on, Alexander takes his clue, though space conceived as a stuff is undoubtedly in his opinion an attribute of one infinite substance. For Bergson it is time which is funda- mental, and all phenomena are precipitated within the flux of time. Time is not only objectively and independently real, it is the one ultimately real creative principle. And this time, the essence of which is duration and free creation, is to be conceived as absolutely free from spatiality. Bergson agrees with Gentile that reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the manifold is of the essence of space. Space which is thus envisaged as a principle of reci- procal exclusion is a shadow of the intellect; it is said to be correlative to our thought which is weighted with geometry. Bergson disagrees with Gentile with regard to the nature of multiplicity. While, according to Gentile,, all objective multiplicity is necessarily mutually exclusive and spatial, according to Bergson, there may be non-spatial multiplicity. Time is, in Bergson's view, an interfused and interpenetrating multiplicity involved in one creative urge; it is an indivisible creative act or movement. It is our intellectual habit of employing spatial metaphors that prevents an undistorted vision of the nature of time. That same habit is responsible for our conception of physical space-time or of equable and homogeneous mathematical time. The intellect, by virtue of its cinematographic mechanism, finds it practically necessary or useful to take static snapshot views of the continuous mobility of time. These immobile snapshots are then placed in juxtaposition in space...

THE EPOCHAL THEORY OF TIME

Like Russell, Whitehead also subscribes to the relational theory of space and time. According to Whitehead, the fundamental fact is the passing of nature, its development, its creative advance. "Actual entities", "actual occasions", or "events", which are involved in the creative advance of Nature, are also extensive one in relation to another. Time and space ori- ginate as abstractions from these two basic facts, namely, the passage of events and the extension of events over each other. Space, however, differen- tiates itself from time, in Whitehead's opinion, at a somewhat developed stage of the abstractive process. Space and time are not, of course, abstrac- tions in the sense that they do not express real facts for us. When White- head calls them abstractions, he means to assert that there are no spatial facts or temporal facts or even spatio-temporal facts apart from physical nature. Space and time are, in his opinion, merely ways of expressing cettain truths about the relations between events. Moreover, what we mean by space or time under one set of circumstances is not what we mean by space or time under another set of circumstances. The fundamental and more general scheme of relations of which space and time are speciali- sations is what Whitehead calls "the extensive continuum". This extensive continuum is not a fact prior to the world; it is the first determination of order that is, of real potentiality arising out of the genral character of the world...

SPACE AND TIME AS RELATIVE, BUT NOT RELATIONAL

Professor Alexander, who is in dead earnest with the reality of space and time, repudiates the relational theory as expounded by Russell and White- head. Space and time are v/ithout doubt relative to each other, but still, in his opinion, they can hardly be treated as relational schemes abstracted from a concrete stuff of sense-data or actual occasions of experience. Nor is space-time a form of matter, as Einstein suggests. Alexander is emphatic in his assertion that space-time is the fundamental stuff of all things; it is, in his picturesque pharaseology, "the matrix of all existence and the nurse of all becoming." Space-Time is the fundamental stuff, not of course in the traditional sense of substance, but in so far as it is the world in its simplest form of expression; it is the primordial form of existence within which all empirical things are differentiated as finite complexes of motion. An empirical thing, say an orange or even a patch of colour, not only occu- pies a definite portion of space-time, but is itself extended and enduring. Space-time may be said to penetrate into its very essence and being. So, the question is forced into our mind. What would be the relation between the spatio-temporal essence of a thing and the portion of space-time which it externally occupies? A very embarrassing question this! Alexander holds that the relation between space-time and empirical existents is not, to be sure, an external one. Taking his clue from Spinoza, he maintains that all material objects are modes of space or extension, or, to be more accurate and in keeping with modern ways of thinking, they are spatio-tem- poral configurations differentiated by some empirical emergent quality...

In McTaggart's philosophy we find that a serious attempt is made to demonstrate the synthetic character of space and time as both subjective and objective. He calls them phenomena bene fundata in as much as they are not mere phenomena in Kant's sense of the term, but are such phenomena as correspond to some indisputable features of ultimate reality. Space is cha- racterised by co-existence of a plurality of reciprocally exclusive parts and by infinite divisibility of these parts. Now, the features of co-existence, reciprocal exclusion, and infinite divisibility are ultimately real, because according to McTaggart reality consists of an impersonal unity of a plurality self-subsistent spiritual substances or selves, which are mutually exclusive in respect of their existence. The nature of each of these self-subsistent selves is infinitely divisible, the terms in the process of such division being perceptions of other selves and their perceptions. What is erroneous or illusory about space is its appearance as an attribute of matter or as locus of the existence of matter. McTaggart advances an array of close-knit arguments to demonstrate the unreality of matter...

SPACE-TIME AS SELF-EXTENSION OF THE SPIRIT

It should be abundantly clear from the foregoing discussion that according to the Integral Idealism of Sri Aurobindo the fundamental reality of space-time is spiritual self-extension of ultimate reality. Reality is, in its original status and intrinsic nature, the spaceless and timeless Spirit. Space and time are the same Reality self-extended to contain the deployment of what is within it. Now, the self-extension of the infinite and eternal Spirit must be infinite and eternal too. So it may be said that the fundamental truth of space is the infinity of the Infinite, whereas the fundamental truth of time is the eternity of the Eternal. This doctrine of the spiritual essence of space-time would not in the least be affected by the diversity of interpre- tation that might be placed upon the spacific relationship between space and time. The spiritual theory of space and time may primarily be under- stood to mean that Space is Brahman as self-extended status, and Time is Brahman as self-extended movement. This implies that Space is a static extension *n which all things stand or move together in a fixed order, and Time is a mobile extension which is measured by movement and flux of events. But such a construction would be based upon our prima facie inaccurate impressions about space and time. The truth perhaps is that Space is Brahman as self-extended for the holding together of forms and objects, and Time is Brahman as self-extended for the deployment of the movement of self-power carrying forms and objects. Such a view would make Space and Time not two different kinds of self-extension, but two inseparable aspects of one and the same self-extension of the cosmic Eternal.

Bradley has drawn the attention of the philosophic world to the existence of different spaces and different times. In addition to one all-embracing physical space, there are different dream-spaces, imaginary spaces, and the conceptual space that functions as the habitat of our different concepts. Similarly, in addition to one all-embracing physical time there are dream times and the imaginary times that belong to our different stories. The commonsense method of understanding this multiplicity of different spaces and different times is to affirm the reality of physical space and physical time alone, and to relegate the rest of it to the realm of pure illusion. Prof. Alexander, a neo-realist that he is, cannot but accord reality to mental spaces and mental times, but he takes considerable pains to show that the latter have spatio-temporal connection with, and consequently fall within, the one all-emcompassing physical Space-Time. Mr. Bradley maintains that mental spaces do no doubt possess a type of reality of their own, but still they cannot be said to have any spatial connection with the physical space which is as much a product of ideal construction as they themselves are. In his judgment, the different kinds of space, physical and mental, can be united in the Absolute only in some sort of non-spatial unity. Simi- larly, mental times such as belong to dreams and stories cannot be said to have any temporal connection with the physical time which is as much an ideal construction as the former. So, the different kinds of time, physical and mental, can be united in the Absolute only in some sort of non-temporal unity.

Integral Idealism holds that different spaces and different times which are relative to different states of consciousness do surely enjoy each a spacific type of reality of its own. But, according to Integral Idealism, the fundamental truth and essential basis of the wide diversity of spaces and times is neither one physical space-time as Alexander holds, nor one mys- terious all-engulfing Whole that swallows them up beyond recognition as Bradley suggests, but the self-extension of the creative Spirit. All times and spaces are, as Sri Auiobindo puts it, "renderings of a fundamental spiritual reality of Time-Space." ...

As Sri Aurobindo testifies 'out mind can move in its own space in such a way as to effectuate a movement also in space of Matter or act upon something distant in space of Matter!- But behind this mental extension, there is a stil! higher kind of extenson, a pure spiritual space, which contains within itself the secret essence of phy- sical space. A man can step back into this higher kind of extension by a mighty effort of concentration. From pure spiritual space which is revealed to the inward eye of the soul time seems to drop away, as there is no perception of any change or movement there. It is this timeless spiritual extension which manifests itself in the shape of the subjective mind-field at the level of the pure mind, and in the shape of the objective field of senseperception at the level of the sense-mind. Similarly, by drawing back from the physical time by inward spiritual movement, it is possible to have an increasing insight into the essence of the temporal. Just as the ultimate truth about the nature of space is the infinity of the Infinite, so also the ultimate truth about the nature of time is the eternity of the Eternal.

We, human beings, involved as we are in the movement of time, are tied down to the passing moment in respect of immediate experience. Moving along with the movement of time, we can lay hold only of very tiny temporal fragments that go to constitute our ever-shifting specious present. The past and the future alike are to us but ideal constructions. But though we cannot directly perceive the past and the future, we construct the time- process in our imagination as a beginningless and endless series, as an eternal movement, flow or stream. Now, critical reflection can never reconcile itself to such a beginningless and endless movement of time. The infinite time-process, which is for us an ideal construction, must also be capable of being directly experienced in order that it may be said to be concretely real.

Royce suggests that just as a definite length of time, however small, the specious present that contains a rearward and forward-looking end, is immediately given to the finite span of human consciousness, similarly the whole time-process with its three periods of past, present and future, must be immediately present in a flash of intuition to the "Eternal Now" or the infinite span of consciousness of the Absolute.

Royce maintains that it is utter folly to denounce the infinite time-process as a "bad infinite". Even when considered as a conceptual construction, the time-series, properly understood, is quite self-coherent and satisfactory to the intellect. Modern mathematics has amply demonstrated that the concept of the serial infinite is quite intelligible as a self-imaging or self-representative system (as a "kette"). It is present at a stroke to our thought by means of its defining concept. But in order that the time-process may gain concrete reality, it must also have a place, in Royce's opinion, in some all-inclusive immediate expe- rience. It must be present indeed as a "totum simul" to the infinite span of consciousness of the Divine. "The eternal insight", as Royce puts it, "observes the whole of time and all that happens therein, and is eternal only by virtue of the fact that it does know the whole of time".

But the infinite order of time is not only concretely real as an object of immediate consciousness of God, it is not simply a totum simul., it is also, as Pringle Pattison points out, a singificant whole embraced in the Divine Consciousness which at the same time transcends it. It is significant as a teleological scheme, the successive moments of time being different stages in the progressive realisation of the Divine Will or Purpose. It is to this fact of being sustained by the Divine Will that the infinite process of time owes its unity and continuity. If, however, we are to follow the indications of spiritual experience, we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that there is also an aspect of conscious- ness, a poise of being of the Spirit, to which the category of time is simply inapplicable. The Spirit in its supracosmic transcendence is characterised by timeless eternity. In respect of its immediate status or self-absorbed essentiality, the Absolute is without any development of consciousness in movement or happening. But since supra-cosmic transcendence, cosmic universality, and intnv-cosmic individuality are, in the view of Integral Idealism, only different poises of being of the same Supreme Spirit, so timelessness, totum simul, and time-movement, are but different statuses or positions taken by consciousness with regard to the same Eternal Reality. While Bradley's conception of eternity as the transmuted essence of time is true of the Spirit in its self-absorption, Royce's view of eternity as a totum simul or as the whole-consciousness of an infinite succession is true of the Spirit in its cosmic universality or dynamic creativity, and the ordinary view of eternity as an endless march of time is true of the Spirit in its individual entanglement in the creative flux.

It must not be supposed that the different presentations of the Eternal as described above are incapable of existing together, so that they are only successive phases either in our apprehension of reality or in the gradual self-alienation of reality itself. It must not, for example, be supposed that when the timeless experience of the Absolute is attained, the embracing consciousness of time as a totum simul or the simultaneous integrality of Time as well as the advancing consciousness of the time-movement must forthwith melt away like vanishing mist. It must not also be supposed that God cannot at the same time have an aspect of timeless experience and an aspect of inclusive consciousness of the entire time-process. Timelessness, eternal now, and endless succession are in fact the same Eternity in its different forms relative to the different poises of being of the Spirit. They form a simultaneous multiplicity of self-presentations of the same Reality; they correspond to different powers of self-awareness of the Supreme, the power of status and non-manifestation, the power of self-effectuating action, and the power of sportive self-entanglement in the flux of becoming. God in His unmanifest essentiality is eneffably non- temporal; God in His self-manifestting creativity is inclusive of the temporal; and God in His self-alienated embodiment moves long with the movement of the temporal.

Lacan, like Freud, believed that religion is a fetish or a distortion of the real desiring mechanisms that animate it

parodycenter Says: May 2, 2007 at 1:25 pm continued from the book:
perhaps for some Lacan was not a good Catholic, but one thing is indisputable - he was a Jesuit pupil. His knowledge of theology was discreet (more precisely, he never brought it to the foreground) but not superficial. His serious playing with the basic structures of the Catholic Tryad is only the most obvious confirmation of my viewpoint. Lacan was no theologist, but theological discourse was not alien to him. To the contrary. In his encounter with Joyce, Ulysses, this will become visible. The relation Father-Son will be placed here in its (not orthodox, but still triadic) frame. This is why I believe that for Lacan’s persona you can use Thomas’s EST RELATIO.

In other words, I believe he and Thomas share the same position. There are differences in nuances. The essence, however, is indisputable. The persona is the effect of a relationship - between $ and A and $ and a. Up until this point the structure of thinking is crypto-Thomasian. But Lacan goes one step further than Thomas. His speculative psychoanalytic triadology will in the end be transformed into a mystical apophatics. Someting ELSE, something entirely different will be introduced into the game. The sign o will simultaneously signify the place of death, and the Abgrund of Schwabic mystics - the place of birth. In the case of Theresa d’Anville this will mark the topos of her ultimate mystical experience. (to be continued)

larvalsubjects Says: May 2, 2007 at 1:38 pm
I find the passages from the book you cite interesting as this sort of fallacious reasoning comes up so often among religious readers of Lacan. I regularly teach Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in my philosophy classes. Philosophically I’m influenced by some aspects of Thomism. Does this mean that I share Thomas’ religious beliefs? No. Deleuze is influenced by Duns Scotus’ account of univocity. Does this mean he shares Scotus’ religious beliefs? Again no. Lacan studied theology extensively. He studied Zen buddhism extensively. He studied a number of things extensively.

Suppose a psychoanalyst studies Nazi ideology extensively and from this discovers some basic structures of how jouissance and group relations are organized. Does this mean the psychoanalyst now endorses Nazi ideology. It simply means that Nazi ideology is one formation of subjectivity that needs to be accounted for within the constraints of psychoanalytic theory. It should be fairly obvious that this is Lacan’s motivation in studying Christian theology. Lacan contended that every psychoanalyst should study theology. The reason for this is obvious, theology provides a good deal of insight into the nature of transference, the subject supposed to know, fantasies of completeness, the way in which the subject relates to the law, structures of desire borne of prohibition and so on. This doesn’t change the fact that Lacan, like Freud, believed that religion is a fetish or a distortion of the real desiring mechanisms that animate it. Some religiously minded people seem to have a tremendously difficult time distinguishing between understanding something and believing something to be true.

Celebrating 200 years since the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology

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Reading Hegel: The Introductions
by G.W.F. Hegel (edited and introduced by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra)

Hegel’s brilliant Introductions, provided all together here, offer a panoramic overview of his grand system. The Introductions are the most accessible of Hegel’s writings, concisely and clearly laying out the Hegelian project. Although each Introduction deals with the distinct theme of the text which it introduces, ultimately they are all inextricably linked together: the natural result of Hegel’s systematic method. As the Editors’ Introduction demonstrates, Hegel’s thought comes across as a system where all particulars take their respective places along the ‘circle’ of knowledge. Thus, each chapter in the book presents an element of this edifice. Read more...

The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics
by Sam Gillespie

In this characteristically incisive analysis, Sam Gillespie maintains that, whereas novelty in Deleuze is ultimately located in a Leibnizian affirmation of the world, for Badiou, the new, which is the coming-to-be of a truth, must be located at the 'void' of any situation. Following a lucid presentation of the central concepts of Badiou's philosophy as they relate to the problem of novelty (mathematics as ontology, truth, the subject and the event), Gillespie identifies a significant problem in Badiou's conception of the subject which he suggests can be answered by way of a supplementary framework derived from Lacan's concept of anxiety. Read more...

The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking
by Toula Nicolacopoulos, George Vassilacopoulos and Paul Ashton (editors)

“it belongs to the weakness of our time not to be able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit, to feel crushed before them, and to flee from them faint-hearted.” (Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, v2, p. 10)

Is it becoming more obvious today that the thinkers of the post-Hegelian era were/are not “able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit”? Is our era the era of the “faint-hearted” philosophy? Celebrating 200 years since the publication of The Phenomenology of Spirit this volume addresses these questions through a renewed encounter with Hegel’s thought. Read more...

Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra: All of Hegel’s major Introductions in one place

Reading Hegel
the introductions
G.W.F. Hegel
Edited by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra

Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel’s major Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present readers with Hegel’s systematic thought through his Introductions alone.The Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel’s Introductions truly reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel’s Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate tapestry of Hegel’s thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one book to another, one philosophical moment to another.

Hegel’s reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and law—all included here—have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers, from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan’s famous Kyoto School or India’s Aurobindo.

This book provides the opportunity to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally germinated in Hegel’s writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel’s worldview in his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.

AAKASH SINGH is a Research Professor at the Centre for Ethics and Global Politics (Luiss University, Rome), specializing in International Legal and Political Philosophy. He is author of Eros Turannos, and Editor of several books, including Buddhism and the Contemporary World:An Ambedkarian Perspective, and L’Inde à la conquete de la liberté.

RIMINA MOHAPATRA studied Philosophy at Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College. She has been a Junior Research Fellow of the University Grants Commission of India and a Junior Specialist at the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Though professionally working as an Editor at Routledge, she is spending all her spare time formulating and compiling a second collection of Hegel’s writings, to be published in 2009.
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In 1999 some Sri Aurobindo followers expressed concern at Ken Wilber using the term "Integral Psychology"

Wilber uses the word "integral" - meaning "to integrate, to bring together, to join, to link, to embrace. Not in the sense of uniformity...but in the sense of unity-indiversity, shared commonalities along with our wonderful differences" [A Theory of Everything] to describe his philosophy.

In 1999 some Sri Aurobindo followers expressed concern at Ken Wilber using the term "Integral Psychology" as a title for one of his new books, as this term has already been used by the Aurobindo community to refer to a spiritual/esoteric/occult psychology based on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In the 1960s Swami Satchidananda had also adopted the Aurobindoan term "Integral Yoga" for his own completely unrelated teaching). However, Wilber himself actually adopted the term from Swiss cultural historian Gene Gebser (1905-1973) as early as the mid 1970s [Where's Wilber At? p.28 n.8]

Wilber-IV and AQAL marks the beginnings of Wilber's Postmodernism, and postmodernistic techniques of criticism are enthusiastically applied to all fields of knowledge. Through his model, Wilber claims to have deconstructed the compartmentalized, disconnected worldview of science (objective), religion (subjective), and ethics (intersubjective) and replaced it with a more unified
integrated one, with each area of knowledge going in one of the quadrants. Each quadrant has its own validity claim, its own relative, partial, but still totally authentic truth. With each type or knowledge there are specific types types of evidence and validation procedures.

***

October 2, 2008 Hinduism and Mystic Judaism Posted by Benjamin under blog, dharma, hindu, kabbalah, mysticism Hinduism and Mystic Judaism by Chris (posted Monday, September 24th, 2007 on chrisqq.wordpress.com

This view certainly coincides with very closely with Hindu views of God. I think that the Judaic tree of life is described in abstract terms because of the biblical dictates against making images of God. This prevented Jewish mystics from using straightforward images as Hindus do.

This aspect of the Kabbala corresponds closely with the Hindu Jnana Yoga. Judaism also has equivalent ideas to Bhakti Yoga. The founder of Hassidic Judaism Baal Shem Tov saw prayer and devotion as more important than the study of the Talmud and the tree of life. He also saw great importance on purity. He declared the whole universe, mind and matter, to be a manifestation of the Divine Being; that this manifestation is not an emanation from God, as is the conception of the Kabbalah by Mitnagdim (religious Jews who opposed Chasidism), for nothing can be separated from God, echoing Advaita Vedanta.

There have also been attempts to show that the tree of life reflect the Yogic chakras. Altogether, there are striking parallels between Judaism and Hinduism. Some of these certainly emerged as mystical revelation. It is also possible that some of these concepts were within Judaism from the beginning, echoing the original true world religion.

Merleau-Ponty is close to Saint Agustin whose conception of time is strictly related to the ‘presence’ of the subject

Homepage > Arts and Cultures > The primacy of perception in the era of communication
[ FR ] [ IT ] Marco Cesario
To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an international congress held at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris discussed once again the concepts of space and time introduced by this philosopher, whose work seems a seamless dialogue with other sciences such as psychology, neurology, physics, literature and art. A opportunity to debate not only his philosophical position set in current times, but also for using the instruments provided by his phenomenology so as to readdress the idea of space and time in the era of communication.

A transversal study of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of time and space does not mean only analyzing the relationship between those categories and objects and events perceived by the conscience, but also to open a constructive dialogue between pure phenomenology and others sciences such as psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, neurology, biology, physics and arts. The objective is to reconstruct and develop Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “this space and this time that we are” through the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, and Whitehead, but also through the work of Proust, Claudel and Simon.

These were the conclusions of the international congress of philosophy “Merleau-Ponty. L’espace et le temps”, which took place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to celebrate the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth. The congress gathered together many experts from France, the United States and Japan, who attempted to answer the questions posed by Merleau-Ponty’s main work, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The event has today a special meaning, because we should not only discuss his philosophical positions, but also use his ‘phenomenological instruments’ to rethink the categories of space and time in the age of global communication. The new technological instruments and the media’s increasing power, provide us with free access to knowledge, as well as the possibility to become actors in spreading this knowledge. This is an advantage compared to period during which Merleau-Ponty debated ‘spatial consciousness’ because these new technologies have provoked an enlargement of cognitive structures and perceptive consciousness.

A new conception of space In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty affirms that space is not the ‘real’ or the ‘logical’ ambit within which things are placed, but “the environment by which the position of things becomes possible”. From this point of view, space would not be a sort of ‘ether’ in which things are suspended but - as the philosopher himself explains - “the universal power of their connections”. I can stand between objects and consider space as their natural ambit or simply as their common attribute. But I can grasp the nature of space as from a subject and his interiority. Even if prior to me, space existed only in relation to a perceiving subject. When I observe the front of a house, I’m able to guess its dimensions and the position of the side-walls even if I’m not able to observe them directly. By isolating the house from its “horizon” (the other houses, the gardens etc), the house looks as if it emerges from a flat and bi-dimensional texture to become tri-dimensional. The house ‘comes out’ thanks to a special synthesis between what the eye is able to see and what the eye is able to guess, geometrically, behind the front. If I turn around the house, the front, the side-walls, disappear progressively and the back of the house suddenly ‘appears’. But the house I see is always the house observed from one or another precise point of view.

According to Merleau-Ponty, space does not exist by itself, but in relation to the subject and to the conscience’s phenomenal field. From this point of view, the body does not move because there’s an empty space. The body is “an attitude in view of a present or possible task” and space is the means for this possibility. The body is inside the space just as the heart is inside the body. It keeps the ‘vision’ of visible things alive and creates with it a system. If I walk in an empty space without having a global perception of all the possible perspectives opened by my path, I would not be able to judge those perspectives as different aspects of the same reality. Thanks to the presence of a subject within a situation, and thanks to its movement within space, this synthesis can be possible. The space is inside the subject and the conscience is itself spatial.

Space and neuro-cognitive sciences today Today, says Alain Berthoz, we cannot talk about a ‘singular’ space anymore, because for a living organism there are a multiplicity of mechanisms and levels of treatment of spatial proceedings. Following in the footsteps of Poincaré and Einstein, Berthoz refuses an ‘axiomatic’ approach to space, because it does not consider the role of sensible experience, of action and movement. According to Berthoz, today’s dominating idea of space is based on the preconceived idea that the brain treats spatial elements with the instruments provided by Euclidean geometry. Merleau-Ponty has also managed to avoid the classical concept of depth (based on the geometrical relations between distance, width and apparent surface) to introduce the notion of a ‘changing point of view’, which allows a virtual body to evaluate a viewed and not a measured width. In the famous example of a woman with a big hat passing through a slightly low doorway, the woman includes her hat within the boundary lines of her movement. The hat becomes definitely a part of her inner bodily scheme.

Space, motility and body art According to Merleau-Ponty, space is motility. To explore an object I must move towards it by putting it at a distance. If I change the perspective, the object’s perception also changes. Thanks to this movement, I am able to verify the depth and the thickness of the object. But the object I see is the consequence of an immediate synthesis of its geometrical proportions. According to Stephan Kristensen, of Geneva University, the subject should not be conceived as ‘substance’ but as a ‘mobile figure’ and the body is the condition of his subjectivity. From this point of view, access to the interiority is possible only through the exhibition and the representation of the body. Those concepts are the basis of modern body art. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in fact, inspired artists like Vito Acconci and Lygia Clark.

Time and simultaneity: from Saint Agustin to Einstein passing through Freud and Proust Inspired by the ideas elaborated by Martin Heidgger in his famous lecture Der Begriff der Zeit (1925), Merleau-Ponty sets aside the conception of a ‘chronometric’ time. Time, according to Aristotle, is related to movement and duration in space. That is why it can be measured and quantified. But Merleau-Ponty’s spatial researches in the fields of neuro-cognitive sciences and experimental psychology caused him to abandon this concept of time. For instance, chronologically 3 comes before 5 but both are located within time and presuppose it. Time does not per se exist, but in relation to events occurring within it. By turning over the famous Heraclites’ metaphor, time would not be unidirectional, depending on an observer’s point of view. Time needs a “view over time”. According to Merleau-Ponty, the river is not coming from the past, passing through the present and going to the future. It is quite the opposite. The source looks like coming from the future and, once past the observer, the river falls to the abyss of past.

From this point of view, Merleau-Ponty is close to Saint Agustin whose conception of time is strictly related to the ‘presence’ of the subject in the past, the present and the future (thanks to the faculties of memory, attention and anticipation). But in the notes of Le Visible et l’Invisible, as emphasised by Mauro Carbone (Milan University), Merleau-Ponty refers also to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Proust’s Recherche. The idea of time would be connected with Freud’s unconscious and with an ‘indestructible’ and ‘a-temporal’ past. This past keeps living and modifying the present. Events do not unroll successively but simultaneously, beyond the distinction of time and space. By asserting that “reality only forms within the memory”, Merleau-Ponty means that the past is not just an illusion of reality but, thanks to temporal distance, it can develop its own meaning. Proust, in his famous pages in which he describes Méséglise’s hawthorns, by asserting that “the true hawthorns are those of the past”, paints the essence of a mythical time, a time “prior to time”, “further than India and China”. 8 Sep 2008 Send us your opinion. Write to us at doc@resetdoc.org

A difference arises between the human ease and the divine case

Three in one: believing in the triune God Christian Century, April 17, 2007 by William C. Placher
TO UNDERSTAND something complicated, we often begin with something similar yet simpler. The analogous ease gives us a start in the process of understanding, although, to be sure, later on we have to do some deconstructing, discovering how the two eases are different as well as similar. With respect to the triune God, the theological tradition offers two analogies--one social, one psychological--that give hints at insight even while reminding us that all analogies break down well before we reach real understanding of God.

Scripture tells us that human beings are made in God's "image and likeness" (Gen. 1:27-28), so human beings are an obvious place to start in looking for analogies for God. Two obvious features of human beings are 1) that we exist in relation with others and 2) that we think and consciously pursue goals.

In Aristotle's famous terms, humans are at once "political animals" and "rational animals." A person would not be human, Aristotle says, if he did not exist in relation to other humans, as part of a community. A person would also not be human if he did not engage in acts of knowing and willing--and at the core of willing is to desire or love something. From these two characteristics of humanity, theologians developed a "social analogy" and a "psychological analogy" to the Trinity...

A difference arises between the human ease and the divine case. In the ease of human persons, each has a different body and thus a different spatial location. Further, they can disagree with one another and thus find themselves at odds, or they can turn inward on themselves and attempt to deny their essential relatedness. The divine three, however, are not embodied, are always perfectly in accord, and always glorify one another in mutual love, so that they are inseparably one even while they are three.

In contrast to this, Augustine proposed a psychological analogy, which was further developed by Anselm and Aquinas. The human mind, this analogy begins, exists in knowing and loving. But knowing and loving are not activities in which the mind happens to engage; rather, the mind exists precisely in the doing of these activities. Further, a person cannot truly love some thing without knowing that thing (or one would be loving only a figment one's own imagination), and cannot truly know something without loving it (for one needs the empathy of love to achieve full understanding): "And so you have a certain image of the Trinity: the mind itself and its knowledge, which is its offspring and its word about itself, and love as the third element, and these three are one."

Aquinas developed this analogy in more detail. Consider a mind engaged in knowing itself. In order to know itself, it has to form a concept--an image or likeness--of itself, what Aquinas calls "a word of the mind." If it knows itself perfectly, then that word will be an exact likeness of the mind that knows. In this ease, furthermore, the word is brought forth by the mind and has the same substance as the mind; and when one thing brings forth another that has the same substance as the first, we call that "generation" or "begetting." Hence the second element in the psychological analogy can be called not only the "word" of the first but also "begotten," "child"--or, in a masculine-oriented way of looking at such things, "son."

Loving, however, is different from knowing. The will does not create a likeness of that which it wills but rather has an inclination to the thing it wills. While perfect love involves knowing what one loves, it is the knowledge rather than the love that creates the image of the object known and loved in the mind. "So," Aquinas explains, "what proceeds in God by way of love, does not proceed as begotten, or as son, but proceeds rather as spirit; which name expresses a certain vital movement and impulse." ...

As Aquinas noted, such analogies certainly cannot justify theological inferences; we cannot say, "This is true in the human ease, and the divine ease is analogous, therefore it, or something like it, must be true in the divine ease." The best justification of the explicit use of these analogies is that we implicitly use them anyway: the language in which we speak of the Trinity embodies a history in which these analogies are included. So better to get them out in the open, notice their limitations, and allow each to deconstruct the other.

Apart from their intrinsic inadequacies, the analogies also break down because of the imperfections of human beings, with whom they are drawing analogies. While I cannot be human except in relation to others, I am always curving in on myself and failing to be as fully open to such relations as I ought to be. While I exist as a thinking, willing being by knowing and loving the world around me, I never know or love perfectly, and therefore my knowledge and love never become identical with their objects...

William C. Placher is a CENTURY editor at large. This article is excerpted from his book The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology, published this month by Westminster John Knox.
COPYRIGHT 2007 The Christian Century Foundation COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning [7:46 AM]

Language itself, the very medium of non-violence, of mutual recognition, involves unconditional violence

ISSN 1751-8229 IJŽS Volume Two, Number Three
LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE
Slavoj Žižek

In his "Critique of Violence," Walter Benjamin raises the question: "Is any non-violent resolution of conflict possible?"(2431) His answer is that such a non-violent resolution of conflict is indeed possible in what he calls "relationships among private persons," in courtesy, sympathy and trust: "there is a sphere of human agreement that is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language.’(245)

This thesis of Benjamin belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order is that of the medium of reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful co-existence, as opposed to a violent medium of immediate and raw confrontation.2 In language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum recognition of the other. The entry into language and the renunciation of violence are often understood as two aspects of one and the same gesture: ‘Speaking is the foundation and structure of socialization, and happens to be characterized by the renunciation of violence,’ as a text by Jean-Marie Muller written for UNESCO tells us.3 Since man is a ‘speaking animal,’ this means that the renunciation
of violence defines the very core of being-human: ‘it is actually the principles and methods of non-violence … that constitute the humanity of human beings, the coherence and relevance of moral standards based both on convictions and a sense of responsibility,’ so that violence is ‘indeed a radical perversion of humanity.’4 Insofar as language gets infected by violence, this occurs under the influence of contingent ‘pathological’ circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication.

What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak?5 When we perceive something as an act of violence, we measure it by a presupposed standard of what the "normal" non-violent situation is – and the highest form of violence is the imposition of this standard with reference to which some events appear as "violent." This is why language itself, the very medium of non-violence, of mutual recognition, involves unconditional violence. So, perhaps, the fact that reason (ratio) and race have the same root tells us something: language, not primitive egotistic interests, is the first and greatest divider, it is because of language that we and our neighbors (can) "live in different worlds" even when we live on the same street. What this means is that verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence. Take the example of anti-Semitic pogroms, which can stand in for all racist violence. What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking, what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but to the image/figure of the ‘Jew’ which circulates and has been constructed in their tradition.

The catch, of course, is that one single individual cannot distinguish in any simple way between real Jews and their anti-Semitic image: this image overdetermines the way I experience real Jews themselves and, furthermore, it affects the way Jews experience themselves. What makes a real Jew that an anti-Semite encounters on the street "intolerable," what the anti-Semite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension.

The same principle applies to every political protest: when workers protest their exploitation, they do not protest a simple reality, but an experience of their real predicament made meaningful through language. Reality in itself, in its stupid being-there, is never intolerable: it is language, its symbolization, which makes it such. So precisely when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings and cars, lynching people, etc., we should never forget the placards they are carrying and the words which sustain and justify their acts. It was Heidegger who elaborated this feature at the formal-ontological level, when, in his reading of essence/Wesen/ as a verb ("essencing"), he provided a de-essentialized notion of essence.

Traditionally, "essence" refers to a stable core that guarantees the identity of a thing. For Heidegger, "essence" is something that depends on the historical context, on the epochal disclosure of being that occurs in and through language; his expression "Wesen der Sprache" does not mean "the essence of language," but its "essencing," the making of essences that is the work of language, "language bringing things into their essence, language ‘moving us’ so that things matter to us in a particular kind of way, so that paths are made within which we can move among entities, and so that entities can bear on each other as the entities they are. … We share an originary language when the world is articulated in the same style for us, when we ‘listen to language,’ when we ‘let it say its saying to us.’"6

For a medieval Christian, the essence of gold resides in its incorruptibility and divine sheen which make it a divine metal. For us, it is either a flexible resource to be used for industrial purposes or the stuff appropriate for aesthetic purposes. Or, for Catholics, the castrato voice was once the very voice of angels prior to the Fall. For us today, it is a monstrosity. This change in our sensitivity is sustained by language; it hinges on the shift in our symbolic universe. A fundamental violence exists in this "essencing" ability of language: our world is given a partial twist, it loses its balanced innocence, one partial color gives the tone of the Whole.

"Guru" and "Pundit" in Vivekananda's writings is closely related to the contrast between "book learning" and "experience

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Re: Jean Klein - Western Advaita kelamuni said Aug 6, 2:02 PM:
The use of the expression 'aham' would appear to indicate some Shaiva influence. Ramana also used the expression. There is much in Krishna Menon's writings that is very similar to the Ashtavakra Gita. Indeed, this work, and one's like it seem to indicate a kind of confluence of the classical teachings of Shankara on the one hand and Shaiva non-dualism on the other.

Religion figures in these processes in ways that transcend “beliefs”

Religion in the public sphere: Translation and transformation posted by Craig Calhoun

In my last post, I closed with two questions relating to Jurgen Habermas’s recent work on religion and the public sphere: First, is a genealogical or language-theoretical reconstruction of reason adequate without an existential connection between social and cultural history on the one hand and individual biography on the other? Second, is “translation” an adequate conceptualization of what is involved in making religious insights accessible to nonreligious participants in public discourse (and vice-versa)?
The two questions are closely related, for the issue is how communication is achieved across lines of deep difference. Helpful as translation may be, it is not the whole story. Rawls uses the notion of translation to describe the ways in which the rational arguments of religious people are rendered accessible to secular interlocutors. This would appear to involve a kind of expurgation as well, the removal of ostensibly untranslatable (because irrational) elements of faith. But translation is also a common metaphor for describing communication across lines of cultural difference; indeed many anthropologists speak of their work as the “translation of culture.” Translation implies that differences between languages can be overcome without interference from deeper differences between cultures, or indeed from incommensurabilities of languages themselves. It implies a highly cognitive model of understanding, independent of inarticulate connections among meanings or the production of meaning in action rather than passive contemplation. But the idea of translating religious arguments into terms accessible to secular fellow-citizens is more complicated. To be sure, restricting attention to argumentative speech reduces the extent of problems because arguments are already understood to be a restricted set of speech acts and are more likely to be commensurable than some others. But the meaning of arguments may be more or less embedded in broader cultural understandings, personal experiences and practices of argumentation that themselves have somewhat different standing in different domains. (To “translate” a classic religious argument for the existence of God—e.g., one of Aquinas’s attempts to transform faith into knowledge—into secular terms as a demonstration of God’s existence for unbelievers might be informative, but it could not reproduce the meaning of the original argumentative project.)

Bridging the kinds of hermeneutic distance suggested by the notion of having deeply religious and nonreligious arguments commingle in the public sphere cannot be accomplished by translation alone. Perhaps translation is not meant literally, but only as a metaphor for the activity of becoming able to understand the arguments of another—but that is already an important distinction. We are indeed more able to understand the arguments of others when we understand more of their intellectual and personal commitments and cultural frames (”where they are coming from” in popular parlance). In this regard Habermas sometimes signals a “mutual interrogation” or “complementary learning process” that is more than simply translation. This is important and true to his earlier emphasis on intersubjectivity. But this is still a very cognitive conception, and one that implies parties to a discussion—perhaps a Platonic symposium—who arrive at new understandings without themselves being changed.
Where really basic issues are at stake, it is often the case that mutual understanding cannot be achieved without change in one or both of the parties. By participating in relationships with each other, including by pursuing rational mutual understanding, we open ourselves to becoming somewhat different people. The same goes at collective levels: mutual engagement across national or cultural or religious frontiers changes the pre-existing nations, cultures, and religions, and future improvements in mutual understanding stem from this change as well as from “translation.” Sectarian differences among Protestants or between Protestants and Catholics are thus not merely resolved in rational argumentation. Sometimes they fade without resolution because they simply don’t seem as important to either side. A shifting context and changed projects of active engagement in understanding and forming intellectual and normative commitments changes the significance of such arguments (as for example when committed Christians feel themselves more engaged in arguments with nonChristians and the irreligious—including arguments with those who believe secular understandings are altogether sufficient—than they are in arguments with each other). But a process of transformation in culture, belief, and self is also often involved. We become people able to understand each other. This may improve our capacity to reason together, but the process of transformation is not itself necessarily entirely rational.

Habermas is right when he follows Weithman and Wolterstorff in insisting that the acts of translation necessary to the full incorporation of religious citizens and arguments into the public sphere are not the sole responsibility of the religious, but must be cooperative. But we also need to recognize that histories of mutual engagement that produce both common understandings and citizens able to understand each other are not simply matters of translation or advances of reason. They are also particular histories that forge particular cultural connections and commonalities.
Such cultures of integration are historically produced bases for the solidarity of citizens. Whether they can be construed in evolutionary terms as “advances” in truth or along some other dimension is uncertain. As Mendieta suggests, questions of religion crystallize the tension “between reason as a universal standard and the inescapable fact that reason is embodied only historically and in contingent social practices.” This bears on the nature of collective commitments to processes of public reason and the decisions they produce. The Rawlsian liberal model depends on a “reasonable background consensus” that can establish the terms and conditions of the properly political discourse. Wolterstorff doubts whether this exists. Habermas is more hopeful—and reason for hope seems strongest if what is required is only what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” not a more universal agreement. Hope may be still greater if the overlapping consensus may be forged in multiple vernaculars, and out of cultural mixing, not simply linguistic neutrality. This suggests, however, that what is required is a practical orientation rather than an agreement as to the truth. This is precisely Wolterstorff’s (and Habermas’s) concern: “that majority resolutions in an ideologically divided society can at best yield reluctant adaptations to a kind of modus vivendi”. A utilitarian compromise—based on the expectation of doing better in the next majority vote—is an inadequate basis for continuing solidarity where there is not merely a disagreement over shares of commonly recognized goods, but over the very idea of the good. “Conflict on existential values between communities of faith cannot be solved by compromise.”

This is of course a crucial reason why Habermas has held that we must separate substantive questions about the good life from procedural questions about just ways of ordering common life. I believe he retains the conviction that this separation is important and possible. It is intrinsic to his support for a “constitutional patriotism.” But it is challenged by recognition that for religious citizens to give reasons in terms “accessible” to secular citizens may be unjustly difficult or even impossible. And it is challenged further if one agrees that religious faith, but also specificities of cultural traditions, may make it difficult for citizens to render all that is publicly important to them in the form of criticizable validity claims.
Conflicts between world views and religious doctrines that lay claim to explaining man’s position in the world as a whole cannot be laid to rest at the cognitive level. As soon as these cognitive dissonances penetrate as far as the foundations for a normative integration of citizens, the political community disintegrates into irreconcilable segments so that it can only survive on the basis of an unsteady modus vivendi. In the absence of the uniting bond of a civic solidarity, which cannot be legally enforced, citizens do not perceive themselves as free and equal participants in the shared practices of democratic opinion and will formation wherein they owe one another reasons for their political statements and attitudes. This reciprocity of expectations among citizens is what distinguishes a community integrated by constitutional values from a community segmented along the dividing lines of competing world views.

The basic question is whether or how much commonalities of belief are crucial to the integration of political communities. How important is it for citizens to believe in the truth of similar propositions “explaining man’s position in the world”?
As Durkheim suggested by distinguishing mechanical from organic solidarity, communities are integrated in ways other than by shared values (constitutional or otherwise) and worldviews. But the Durkheimian binary is too simple. Habermas takes it over, to some extent, in the distinction of lifeworld from system. In general (and rightly), he sees a mismatch between the scale of integration accomplished on the basis of systems of money and power without the communicative understanding of participants, and the capacities of the lifeworld to generate such integrative understandings. Insofar as communicative action in lifeworlds yields diverse substantive understandings (and projects) of the good life, it cannot yield the necessary integration on a large scale. But to the extent that communicative action may underwrite agreement on procedures, it may generate a “mechanical” solidarity based on a common view of at least one aspect of the world. This is embodied in the project of constitutionalism, where constitutions are limited to procedural rather than substantive norms. As the phrase “constitutional patriotism” suggests, Habermas also hopes this will help to solve problems of motivation and commitment which are otherwise secured only in commitments to diverse ways of life and solidarities that are incommensurable (such as ethnicities). This invests a great deal of hope in the relatively thin commonality of similarities of propositional belief and acceptance of procedures (however valuable). Communities are also products of a variety of social relationships, recognized in varying degree by their members. Bonds of civic solidarity are produced in networks of practice and functional interdependence that are linguistically recognized as well as on the basis of values and propositions “explaining man’s position in the world as a whole.” Indeed, participation in the public sphere may contribute to this solidarity. Solidarity is not just a condition for reciprocal exchange of reasons in public discourse; it can be a product.

This is not the place to try to defend a different view of the production of social solidarity in which culture is not reduced to common propositional beliefs and the binary oppositions of mechanical and organic or lifeworld and system are complemented by attention to webs of social relations and processes of historical creativity and transformation in culture. My point here is the more limited suggestion that religion figures in these processes in ways that transcend “beliefs.”
Habermas seems to be considering this possibility in his most recent writings. In a post to The Immanent Frame, Charles Taylor notes that Habermas’s “position on religious discourse has considerably evolved; to the point of recognizing that its ‘potential makes religious discourse a serious candidate for possible truth content with respect to relevant political issues.’” (Translation of Habermas quote from Alex Skinner.) I look forward to exploring this interesting development in Habermas’s thinking at another time. This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Religion in the public sphere.